


Patience

by peppersweet



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Did I mention angst, F/M, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rey Nobody, Rise of Skywalker Never Happened, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29513406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppersweet/pseuds/peppersweet
Summary: The last thing Rey remembers is fighting for Luke's lightsaber. Now she wakes on the floor of Snoke's throne room, handcuffed, in First Order custody. The Resistance is defeated. And Ben Solo has not turned back to the light.Ben, meanwhile, claims to still hear the voice of Snoke in his head. The First Order plots against him, and he needs Rey's help to cement his rule. With a little time, and a little patience, she knows she can bring him home.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 9
Kudos: 31





	1. 1

It was like dreaming of running, only to trip, fall, and wake with a start. For a moment, she thought she was back in her bed on Jakku, waking from a nightmare. But as she took a gasping breath of air that smelled of ozone and ash, she remembered where she was.

The throne room. The fight. Ben.

Then she felt someone grasp her arms, pinning them back. Her blurred vision came into focus. The hilt of Luke’s lightsaber lay at her feet, smouldering. When had it broken? She searched her memory, but the last thing she recalled was the sudden impact of something against the ship’s hull, the scream of metal against metal. Then being thrown to the floor. Then nothing. 

With an effort that almost made her call on the Force, she lifted her aching head. Blood rushed in her ears. There was Snoke - or half of him anyway - lying at the foot of his throne. Dead. 

‘Take her to my command ship. Detention six.’

Rey struggled to turn. That was Ben’s voice. But distant, now, commanding; not small and broken like before. 

‘Ben,’ she called out, tasting blood on her lips.

His hand was still held out, just as it had been when he asked her to join him. What if she’d taken it? They’d fought together, what could only have been moments ago - and it felt so right: movement synchronised, minds in tandem. Like she could hear his thoughts and echo them back.

As if hearing her thoughts, Ben’s eyes snapped to hers. Now, there was something disjointed in his stare, something guarded. 

Snoke said he had made their bond; maybe it died with him?

‘Ben,’ she called out, again. 

His true name had worked before. It was like a spell, some sort of incantation.

But the hands at her back tightened their grasp, dragging her away. Ben’s lip curled and he waved, dismissively, in her direction. She felt cold metal cuffs snap around her wrists, and then the effort of keeping her eyes on his became too much, and she let herself be dragged away, figuring that she gambled and lost.

*

The corridors of the ship echoed with sirens and panicked voices. Something had happened, she was sure, perhaps when they both went for Luke’s saber and it had split in half. Could it have done this?

She put as much of the force as she could behind her voice, to make it calm and still as possible, and asked, ‘What happened?’

The troopers surrounding her didn’t respond.

Eventually, they led her onto a transport shuttle. She'd regained some of her strength, enough to make her consider fighting, or trying to run. But inside, a different set of troopers waited; ones dressed in all black, wielding vibrocleavers or blasters of a kind she’d never seen before. Some of them had splashes of mud - or perhaps blood - on their armorweave clothes. Some sort of special operatives, she decided, and definitely too many to fight against. 

Her energy and willpower ebbing away again, she focused on staying stood upright, her eyes open, her breathing steady.

On another ship, they took away her clothes and her boots, scanned her for weapons, and then subjected her to a brisk shower of something that smelled antiseptic and stung her eyes. Then there was an order for her to dress in a jumpsuit of grey flimsiplast that grated against her too-clean skin. An order to proceed into a cell, brightly lit, windowless, with metal-panelled walls and the blinking light of a holorecorder in one corner. A thin metal bench ran the length of one wall, and she settled down on this, cross-legged as if relaxing into meditation. Clenching her hands into fists to try and stop them from shaking.

He’d be watching her on that recorder, him or his troopers. Showing fear - showing how she’d been robbed of her dignity - was not an option. But it had been a long day. Her body trembled and wouldn’t quite stay upright. So she lay down on her side, facing the wall, listening to the pounding of her heart in her ears and imagining it was the sound of the sea on Luke’s planet. 

Hours passed before she heard the shuffle of his boots at her back, the sound of his calm and steady breath. The door’s hydraulic mechanism hadn’t sounded. He must have arrived through their strange force connection.

‘What a mess you’ve made,’ he said.

‘What a mess _we’ve_ made,’ she corrected. ‘Where are you?’

‘Not here. This cell, by the way, is reinforced by several layers of durasteel cladding, and my knights are posted at the door, before you think of repeating what you did on Starkiller base.’ 

She turned over, her limbs aching in complaint. ‘Your knights? How quaint.’

He had not had a chance to change since she’d last seen him - or perhaps he’d chosen not to, because Ben didn’t seem like one for comfort. His surcoat, bloodied, with smears of ash on the armorweave, was burned at the sleeves, and his black hair was unruly and damp with sweat.

It hurt to see him. Just as it hurt to sit up and straighten her back and look resolute. Earlier that day she’d been so certain he’d turn and follow her - that he cared enough, that he wanted her enough. She supposed she wasn’t much of a sight either, with her skin red and abraded by the antiseptic shower, her body small and shapeless inside the flimsy jumpsuit. 

‘What do you expect me to do?’ she said.

Ben scowled. ‘I expect you to do your best.’ 

‘The Resistance,’ she cut in. ‘What happened?’

His expression darkened. ‘Classified information. None of your concern.’

His eyes met hers for the first time and she caught, before he could stop her, a flicker of giddy triumph in his thoughts. 

‘They’re gone,’ she whispered.

‘Like I said. None of your concern.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she hissed. But she felt the truth weigh heavily inside her, hollow and sour. From her viewpoint in Snoke’s throne room, only a handful of Resistance transports could have made planetfall. It would have been easy for the First Order to pick them off.

‘It seems they suffered without your help.’

‘Don’t,’ she whispered. She thought of Chewie, alone on the Falcon. Surely he would have gone to help the Resistance. Delivering her to the First Order - boxed up in an escape pod like some sort of present - would have been a suicide mission. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, stifling a sob, thinking of Finn, how she’d left him behind.

Ben stayed silent, breathing steadily. 

‘Where am I?’ she asked.

He smiled mirthlessly. ‘You’re my guest, for a time,’ His voice cracked and she noticed, for the first time, how his hands were shaking. ‘Your execution is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.’

Ben turned his gaze to the distance, towards something she couldn’t see.

‘It didn’t have to end like this,’ he said. ‘I offered you my hand. You could have taken it.’

Rey opened her mouth to respond, but he was already gone, blinked out of existence as if he’d never been there at all.

‘You could have come with me,’ she said, to the empty cell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!! This is my second Reylo fic that I've been trying to bash out for a good while now, mostly inspired by the FKA Twigs song 'Sad Day' and my emo self listening to it almost every day during 2020. I'm a lil rusty, so I apologise for my overuse of commas and the places I put them.
> 
> Here's my spotify playlist for this fic, aka what I listened to while writing: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3NdNXmsR3D0kHIrHGTWQEt?si=vEujJWlkQn6UPDZwGGhVhw


	2. 2

There was no sense of time in her cell, no day or night. She tried to sleep. It had been a long, hard day - maybe the longest and hardest of her life - and her body hurt in ways she’d never known before. But there was a gnawing dread in the pit of her stomach that wouldn’t let her sleep, and so she turned from side to side, staring alternately at the wall or the floor, thinking of Chewie, Finn, Leia, Luke, Ben. 

Her execution would be tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps tomorrow had already come.

Surely it wasn’t his decision, she thought, turning to face the ceiling. He didn’t have it in him to kill her. If he wanted her dead, it would have happened in the forest on Takodana, or in an interrogation chamber on Starkiller base. 

Rey drew her arms close to her chest, running her fingers across her shoulders. There were new scars there she hadn’t had a chance to take stock of yet. Back on Jakku, she’d often lain awake late at night like this, touching her own skin, imagining what it felt like to be touched by someone else, imagining what it had been like to be held and comforted. Kept safe and warm. For a moment, she indulged this old habit, feeling the coarseness of the flimsiplast jumpsuit underneath her fingertips and thinking of the churning sea on Luke’s island. 

Ben appeared after several restless hours. Like her, he seemed to have foregone sleep. His bloodshot, tired eyes fixed on hers.

‘What a day,’ he said.

Rey curled deeper into herself, resting her forehead against her knees. There was the sound of shifting fabric, the squeak of boots on the floor, as Ben crouched to face her. 

‘We’re in orbit over Jakku. Arrived an hour ago. I’ve had a squadron here since you left us on Starkiller base.’

She sat up. ‘Is this a cruel joke?’

Ben stared at her, gloved hands steepled under his chin. There was still dried blood on his face and ash on his clothes; apparently he’d had more on his mind than rest.

‘I’ve found where your parents are buried. Would you like to see it?’

Her eyes prickled with tears. Not her parents, not when she’d just begun to let go of them. ‘Before you kill me?’

‘That won’t happen.’

‘Why? Change of heart?’

‘I shouldn’t have said it. I didn’t mean it.’ 

‘Then what did you mean?’

Ben’s gaze burned into hers. ‘I sent a squadron there to investigate. Made some enquiries. See if anyone knew where you came from. You hoped they were somebody - that your parents were important - so much that I almost began to hope it myself.’

He paused.

‘Regardless, I believe we’ve found where they’re buried.’ 

Rey thumbed away a tear. ‘I don’t want to see it.’

‘No. Why would you? They were junk traders. They sold you. They didn’t even tell anyone at Niima Outpost your name.’ 

The truth hurt more than it should, even though she remembered, clearly, choosing her name from three random aurebesh letters on the side of a helmet brought back from one of her scavenging trips. R-E-Y. Easy enough for a young girl to read and spell. Probably the callsign of a pilot who’d died years before she was even born.

‘You were worth nothing more to them than the credits and spice your labour bought them.’

‘Stop it.’

‘You know it’s true. You know you’re worth more than that. More than Jakku,’ Ben leaned closer, close enough for her to count the freckles on his dirty face. ‘I’ve been in your head. I know how you went to sleep every night hoping they’d be there in the morning. How much of your life you wasted on people who never wanted you. I know what that means, and I know there is more than that.’

‘You don’t know anything,’ she spat.

But he did know, she thought. He knew better than anyone did. 

He leaned back, sitting cross-legged on the floor. ‘So. We can take you down to the surface in a shuttle, or you can stay here.’ 

She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Then you kill me?’

‘No. You stay here.’

She weighed up his words. No, he wouldn’t kill her. Just as she’d thought. 

‘I don’t want to go,’ she decided, finally. ‘But…’

Ben raised an eyebrow. ’Rey, by all accounts, these were people who sold you to a scrap merchant for another hit of spice. I wouldn’t get too sentimental about them.’

‘My home,’ she blurted out. ‘My AT-AT. I want to go there.’ 

He shook his head. ‘It’s gone. Gutted.’ 

The tears flowed freely now; Rey brought her hands up to cover her eyes, wanting everything to disappear. She thought of the AT-AT - cramped and ramshackle as it was, gritty with sand and rust - and how it had been her shelter for so many years. Her box of tools. Her collection of dried flowers, probably blowing across the dune sea now. 

Ben caught her wrists in his gloved hands. ‘Forget it. You have more here, now, than you ever did then. We can do _so much,_ Rey, with everything we have. Remember how it felt to fight together? Against Snoke’s guards? It felt right. We can build a new order. Forget this one. We’ll do so much more.’

The way they could touch through the force was still so new, so unusual. The feeling of his hands around her wrists sent a shock through her, a surge of emotion that momentarily tangled his thoughts with hers. She could feel him inside her head, a strange presence that had no weight, but felt heavy - like a planet’s gravitational pull. She wanted to lean towards it, to sink into it.

Ben was fixated on her. She could tell that much. Fascinated by everything she had proven herself capable of. She saw herself the way he’d seen her only a day before, defiant and proud in the elevator on the way to Snoke’s throne room. How she bristled with her raw, unfocused power. How she seemed like a ticking bomb. 

She was alive, she thought, because he loved her. Because he’d found the first person in the galaxy who had shown him compassion and clung onto her like she was the last canteen of water in the desert.

She wrested her wrists from his grasp. He’d told her so much already, hadn’t he? After they’d defeated Snoke’s guard. There had been an implicit question in what he’d said to her. _You’re nothing, but not to me._

_Am I something to you?_

‘I don't want this,’ she whispered, her mind reeling. ‘I don’t want to know.’

Ben fixed her with that same unwavering gaze. ‘You don’t get a choice.’ 

‘So what now? You keep me here like some sort of pet?’

He frowned. ‘You think that’s what I plan to do?’

The question hung in the air for a moment.

‘Do what you want on Jakku,’ she said, finally. ‘Firebomb my parent’s grave. Use Unkar Plutt’s outpost as target practice. I don’t care.’

He sighed. ‘We’ll leave and continue on our previous course.’ 

She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. ‘Do what you want. I don’t want any part of it.’

‘We’ll see.’

There was a noise like a breath, and when she opened her eyes, Ben was gone. All the same, his strange gravitational pull remained, as if he was still nearby, somewhere else on the ship - or perhaps only in her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! small disclaimer: I do prefer to keep things close to canon when I write, so while this fic ignores a lot of the overarching plot of TROS, some things from the film (locations/objects mostly) will pop up in this fic, mostly cos I'm not good enough to invent my own ~lore~


	3. 3

Rey was on the verge of sleep when the door’s hydraulic mechanism suddenly hissed, accompanied by the sound of boots on the floor. She turned, expecting Ben to have paid her a visit in person for once - but instead, she was greeted by an officer in crisp grey uniform, flanked by those strange, black-clad troopers she’d seen the day before.

Her stomach turned. Ben must have changed his mind; this must be her execution after all. The officer held out a pair of cuffs, and inclined his head towards the door: time to go.

She closed her eyes as they cuffed her, experimentally feeling out with the Force, reaching out for Ben. Instead, she caught a fleeting taste of panic from the troopers around her. Panic that mirrored her own. They expected her to do something rash. But on the little amount of sleep she’d had, with her body still sore and stiff, she felt oddly serene, as if she floated an inch above the ground, her heart stuck in her throat and beating a steady rhythm there instead of in her chest.

_Ben,_ she called out in her mind, searching for the gravitational pull of his presence as she was led through the ship. _I can’t go yet. Don’t do this. Don’t go this way._

But instead of an execution chamber, they ushered her into a room with soft lighting and grey-panelled walls, where a long window showed the swirling blueness of hyperspace beyond. She almost stopped in her tracks, mesmerised, but the officer yanked at her arm and lead her into another room - one with a proper bed in the corner and a refresher off to one side.

The cuffs unlatched. The officer dipped his head, then left, followed by the troopers and the sound of the door locking, and she was left alone.

Rey stood, breathing hard, hands trembling. There were clothes on the bed. A grey fine-weave gaberwool tunic and trousers, fresh undergarments, a pair of new synthleather boots, a grey overwrap - utilitarian, but finer than anything she’d ever worn in her life. And they were for her, she knew, to replace the flimsiplast jumpsuit.

She sank to her knees and balled the soft fabric of the bedspread into her fists. She wasn’t going to die. Not today.

Heart still beating in her throat, she tore off the jumpsuit and stepped into the refresher. A datapad on the wall invited her to choose from several different wash cycles and, giddily, she pressed them all at once, letting hot, sudsy water rain down on her head. 

Everything hurt. Her stiff muscles, the parts of her skin that were still raw from the antiseptic solution they’d blasted her with the day before. Her head, which throbbed whenever she turned her neck. Gingerly, she massaged the soap through her hair, working out grit and dried blood. The events of the preceding days gradually sloughed off her skin and spiralled down the drain.

All too soon, the water switched off. She tapped the datapad.

‘Shower use is limited to once daily,’ a cool, robotic voice intoned. ‘Should you experience a maintenance issue, refer to your unit administrator.’ 

Rey cursed and began to squeeze water from her hair. If she knew how to slice, she was certain she’d be able to convince the datapad to give her extra showering time.

Out of the refresher, she dressed in the new, neat clothes, and towelled her hair with the flimsiplast suit. In the brief time she took to wash, a tray of food had appeared on the floor. She tore into it without really thinking - ripping apart a roll of soft bread, using it to shovel a fragrant orange stew into her mouth, letting the juice of a jogan fruit dribble down her chin and onto her new tunic - eating, messily and joyously, her first proper meal since leaving the Resistance base on D’Qar. 

It was only when she finished eating, her belly full and aching, that her earlier sense of panic crept back. With the food gone and her once-daily shower taken, there was nothing more to do. Nothing to keep her occupied except her own thoughts. She curled up on the bed, wrapping the soft blanket around her shoulders. On Jakku, she’d slept in her clothes and eaten nothing more than protein-loaf and nutri-bars, but there had always been something to do. Portions to earn and things to fix. A purpose. What did Ben have planned for her here? Would he keep her in this room, keep her as a prisoner, for as long as it took to break her spirit and turn her to the dark side?

Thoughts of Finn, Chewie, Leia, Han, her parents in their pauper’s grave on Jakku, all flowed through her mind unbidden. The lingering taste of jogan fruit on her lips was suddenly sour. She buried her head into the pillow, stifling the urge to scream. 

Soon, she drifted into sleep.

Her headache still lingered when she woke. The tray - licked clean - still lay on the floor with her crumpled, damp flimsiplast suit. 

This was it, she thought. The prison Ben had gifted her. At least it was comfortable.

As if reading her thoughts, an intake of breath indicated his arrival.

‘Comfortable?’ he asked.

Like her, he had taken the opportunity to wash and comb out his hair. This time, the saber was missing from his belt, although she was sure he had it close to hand - wherever he was.

‘I suppose,’ she said.

He crouched on the floor, eyes level with hers.

‘Why did you move me here?’ she asked. ‘Execution definitely off the cards?’

‘The cell you were in was not designed for long-term stays.’

‘What if I don’t want to stay?’

‘You’re in no position to bargain.’

‘I want my own clothes back.’

‘You can’t have them. They were incinerated.’

Her face burned, and her head began to throb with sharp pain. ‘Why?’

‘Not my choice. Quarantine protocol.’

Clothes are clothes, she told herself. Unimportant. All the same, she felt a hot surge of anger at their loss. They had been comfortable. Useful. Familiar.

‘Let it go, Rey,’ Ben said, sounding weary. 

She balled the bedspread beneath her into fists. ‘They're important to me.’ 

Ben switched his gaze to something over her shoulder that she couldn’t see. ‘You’re in an officer’s cabin. I assumed you’d like it more.’

‘I’d like to not be in prison.’

‘This isn’t prison.’

‘Then what is it?’

His eyes flitted back to hers. ‘Safety. The First Order would love your head on a platter. I am doing what I can to keep you safe.’

She laughed. ‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Believe it,’ he said, simply. 

He lowered himself into the same cross-legged position as before, as if to meditate. ‘The people in Niima Outpost spoke very highly of you. You’re a gifted mechanic. The best scavenger.’

‘Then put me back there. They were kinder to me than the First Order.’

Ben closed his eyes and they sat in silence for a moment. Ben didn’t seem like a patient man, usually; Rey wondered if he saved all of his patience for her.

Eventually, he spoke. ‘Did you never wonder why you were so gifted? Why you brought back more than the others? Did you never think there was anything different about you?’

‘I didn’t have the luxury of wondering.’ 

His eyes fixed on hers. ‘It’s a miracle you exist.’

Rey could tell that he meant that with all his being. She took a deep, lingering breath, keeping eye contact with him for as long as she dared, waiting for him to speak. There was that feeling again, the one from the night on Luke’s island, when she reached out for him across the galaxy and found him as real, as tangible, as the rocks beneath her feet. The feeling of his gravitational pull, the way it made her want to open her mind to him like a book.

‘I was alone my whole life,’ she said. ‘That’s why I was better. I had to be.’

‘You’ve known all along, Rey. That you were different. That your parents chose to leave you. Mine chose to leave me too, because I was different in ways they couldn’t understand. I’ve never believed in anything but the truth. But you chose to focus your energy on a lie. A lie you told yourself.’ 

A stern voice in her head - possibly Luke’s - told her that she shouldn’t feel any sympathy for Ben. But she did. She felt the subtle threads of emotion woven into every word. He didn’t know dehydration and hunger and scavenging, but he knew what it meant to be left behind and unwanted. 

But all the same, there was a poison in him she didn’t understand - the feeling of being feared, and hated, and monstrous, and not quite knowing how that happened, or when.

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ she said, without thinking. 

Just as before, she extended her hand to his. He slid off his gloves and set them on the floor beside him, where they promptly disappeared. 

‘A miracle,’ he echoed, his eyes unfocused, his brow furrowed in thought.

Ben flinched when her fingertips brushed the back of his hand. Nobody had ever touched Ben, not unless it was to hurt him. She knew that much from the time their hands touched on Luke’s island. Then again, nobody had ever really touched her either, not on Jakku, not with the Resistance. 

When he spoke again, his voice was low, broken.

‘I need you, Rey.’

For a moment, she felt as though she was back in the elevator on the way to Snoke’s throne room again, pleading with Ben to turn to the light.

‘I’ll help you,’ she murmured.

‘They don’t believe me. About Snoke. I can see it in their heads. And the fact you were there - they - they see that as a weakness. I need you at my side. I need to prove them wrong. And Snoke - he can’t be gone - he’s still…’

Ben tapped the side of his head.

‘He still speaks to me. He cheated death, like a Sith lord. He’s still in my head.’

Her hand instinctively fell away from his; the feeling of his gravitational pull was, for a moment, broken. 

‘Who knows what he’s planning. I know he’ll move against me. But when?’

She shook her head. ‘Ben - there’s no way he could have survived.’

‘You don’t know what he’s capable of,’ he murmured. ‘I need you, Rey.’

She bit her lip. She needed him too; turning him to the light was her way home. 

Eventually, she answered. ‘Alright. What do we do?’

His eyes met hers, and she saw a new resolve in them. 

‘Let me think,’ he said, and rose to leave.

‘One question,’ she blurted out. ‘Who are the troopers in black? The ones who brought me here earlier.’

Ben gave a small, mirthless smile. ‘They’re not troopers. They’re the Knights of Ren.’

‘Are they your personal soldiers?’

‘No,’ he answered. ‘They only serve the dark side.’

‘Then why are they here?’

He was looking over her shoulder again, at something in the distance she couldn’t see. 

'I'm not sure.'

And with the slightest squeak of his boots on the floor, he was gone. 

*

At some point, the datapad in the refresher had switched to a new display that showed the time, most likely set to Coruscant standard. Her next meal arrived at nineteen hundred. This time, there were crisp steamed vegetables with a floury flatbread, a cup of something sweet and syrupy for seconds, and a bottle of cold water that tasted of nothing at all. Water on Jakku had always tasted of rust. 

Once her meal was finished, she tried to meditate, the way Luke had suggested she should as part of her Jedi training. Instead, she found herself focusing on the vegetables. How could food on a ship be so fresh, so clean? Was it grown onboard? Finn had mentioned, briefly, how the First Order was always mobile. No base, no homeworld, just a fleet, always in motion.

Her stomach tightened in a knot. There was no way Finn could have survived the First Order assault, not in the state she’d left him in. 

Rey spread her fingers against the cool floor, reaching out into the faint, but comforting, flow of the force. On Luke’s island it had been a torrent of energy, like sticking her hand into a sandslide on one of the Jakku dunes. Here, the slight vibration of the ship’s engines almost drowned it out. But through the plasteel and metal, she could pick up the odd signature of life here and there, as if listening to a conversation from a distance and only catching the odd word.

But from the fragments she picked up, she decided that the overwhelming mood of the ship was boredom. There was no sense of the raw, exposed energy Ben’s thoughts always brought to hers. Just a ship full of people working, sleeping, eating. 

The meditation was soothing. She sunk, slowly, into the soporific motion of the ship and its inhabitants. If she really concentrated, she could sense the huge weight of the engines beneath her, the crashing of hypermatter in the centre of the ship. She’d always had a knack for feeling the workings of something mechanical; Ben had suggested that was a gift of the force. 

Experimentally, she twitched a finger towards the datapad in the refresher, imagining what lay behind the screen. She’d dismantled enough datapads in her time to know the general bits and pieces inside them. There would be a chipset in there, she thought, that controlled the internal clock. Maybe it could be altered to give her extra showering time? After all, you didn’t need to know how to slice to redirect a current. 

She decided she would think on that in the morning, feeling new slack in her muscles and a heavy weight behind her eyes. Stretching, she stripped off the new clothes and bundled herself under the bedspread, focusing on the rhythm of the engines. 

But sleep was evasive. She watched the datapad change to twenty two hundred hours, then twenty four hundred, then one hundred. She turned and stretched, tensing and relaxing each muscle in turn. Her mind refused to be quiet. Finn and Ben went back and forth through her thoughts. Finn, who she left behind. Ben, who she tried to save. Who she would save. She could turn Ben, she knew, she could convince him to run away with her, and then she could make peace with Finn’s memory. 

A memory of Luke resurfaced: _you opened yourself to the dark side for a pair of pretty eyes. This is not going to go the way you think._ Mentally, she told Luke to go to hell and turned onto her side, away from the datapad’s glowing display.

The dark side wasn’t supposed to look like Ben. It was supposed to be something rotting, something sour, not human, not so much like her. It wasn’t supposed to flinch in surprise when she touched it, nor was it meant to have a hand that felt warm and comforting in hers.

But she wasn’t quite like a Jedi either. The Jedi weren’t allowed to want, or become attached. If she truly was a Jedi - a Jedi who followed the code in those books she’d stolen from Luke’s island - she would see Ben as Luke saw him: a lost cause. 

Wanting - attachment - was new to Rey. She’d always been the thing that was had by someone else. But there was something burning inside that wanted. Demanded. Sparked by the touch of fingertips across the stars, and the vision through the force of who he could be, what he could be to her.

She turned again, looking to the datapad for the time - and finding, instead, a pair of eyes.

Air rushed past her ear. A hand grabbed her wrist. Ben’s saber ignited, dousing them both in shuttering red light. Then there was silence, stillness, as she held her breath. The light went out. Ben’s saber clattered to the floor, extinguished. 

Rey allowed herself to breathe again and Ben shifted, still half-asleep, beside her.

‘I’m not here,’ she whispered. Somehow, the force had summoned him to her bed. And her, no doubt, to his. She drew her free hand up to her chest, where her heart beat a frantic tempo.

‘No,’ he said, squinting at her. ‘You’re here.’

‘You’re dreaming,’ she whispered. 

‘This is the force.’

Her face grew hot, and her heartbeat hammered through her body - in the pit of her stomach, between her thighs, in her temple.

‘I don’t think this is the force,’ she breathed. ‘This is me.’

Ben let go of her wrist. For a few moments, they lay in silence, his eyes flitting back and forth between hers, as if trying to read her thoughts. 

‘Stay,’ he murmured. His hand stretched across the space between them. ‘Please.’

The small, barely-there warmth of his fingertips against hers - it was intoxicating. She closed her eyes and focused on that warmth, alone, until she fell asleep.


	4. 4

The datapad read six hundred hours when she woke, groggy, one arm pinned beneath her and numb. The mattress beside her was warm, with the impression of a body in the wrinkled sheets.

Rey sat up and thumbed sleep from her eyes. He’d been there, right beside her. She’d summoned him there. She’d been thinking of him, then turned to find him at her side. Is that why they’d connected before?

There wasn’t time to think. The door slid open and a droid pushed a tray of food inside, removing yesterday’s in the same movement. Before she could move, the door was shut again and the hydraulic locks sounded. 

She lowered herself to the floor, cross-legged, inspecting the food tray. There was an ache in the pit of her stomach that wasn’t unlike hunger, but felt blunter, somehow. Something that had nothing to do with the food. Breakfast was a bowl of something porridge-like and a protein bar that reminded her of Jakku rations, along with a steaming cup of caf.

She wrapped her hands around the caf and let the steam tickle her face. Unless she had the same luck she’d had on Starkiller Base, there was only one way off the ship, and it was through Ben. 

Entirely possible, she thought, sipping at the caf. His appearance in her bed had all but confirmed it. The way he’d asked her to stay. That was not the same man who led the First Order. And if she could broach their strange force connection, that gave her more power than she’d thought.

Rey closed her eyes and reached out, with her mind, imagining the corridors and cabins of the immense ship, the anonymous grey durasteel panelling, the weight of the engines beneath her. Imagining the wave of his black hair and the freckles on his face. The feeling of being pulled into a new orbit. The feeling of fingertips brushing against hers-

There. His presence snagged, like an uneven tile on the floor.

She opened one eye experimentally. Wherever Ben was, he was sitting, appearing to float in midair before her, one leg propped over his knee.

His eyes flickered to hers and she caught, like a long-distance transmission, the sound of his voice in her head. _Not a good time._

Then he blinked out of existence. 

She frowned. It wasn’t like _he’d_ ever given her the luxury of just leaving when they’d connected before.

She closed her eyes and stretched out again. It was hard to avoid Ben this time. He was present everywhere, as if the low thrum of the engines melded with his voice, as if the durasteel panelling was woven into the fabric of his clothes. 

A sigh. The shifting of fabric. Then Ben was there again, floating absurdly on the other side of the cabin. His hand went up.

‘General, enough.’

Rey waited a moment, breath held, until Ben directed his gaze back to her.

‘Is this important?’ he said.

She exhaled. ‘No.’

He ran a gloved hand through his hair. ‘I was in a briefing.’

‘You never seemed to care what I was doing when you visited me.’

Ben raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not doing anything.’

‘I would be, if I wasn’t in a cell.’

‘You’re hardly in a cell. Couldn’t this wait?’

‘If you want my help, it would be useful if we talked about it.’

‘Alright,’ he said, vanishing from view again.

Rey cursed under her breath. Evidently, he somehow still had more control over their force connection than she did. But before she could reach out into the force and search for him again, the door slid open.

‘So,’ Ben said. ‘Talk.’

She gaped at him. ‘How did you get here so quickly?’

‘I was just there,’ he pointed over his shoulder. ‘These are the command quarters. I did say it was somewhere safer.’

Rey felt her face flush hot. Of course, he’d moved her to the ship’s equivalent of his bedroom. 

‘You asked _me_ for help,’ she hissed. 

His eyes narrowed. This was a different Ben, she decided, from the one who’d reached for her hand in the night. 

‘Is this a tactic?’ he said. ‘What you’re doing.’

‘Is what a tactic?’

‘What you did last night. Is this a plan? Some new Resistance tactic? Snoke said it would be like this.’

‘Like what?’

His face had turned red - with anger or embarrassment, she couldn’t tell. ‘Getting under my skin like this. Did the Resistance tell you to do that?’

‘The Resistance weren’t that desperate.’

‘I disagree.’

‘I came here because I wanted to,’ she said. ‘Because I saw a future where you turned to the light.’

‘You delivered yourself here like a prize thinking I’d turn just because I saw you. Do you take me for some sort of fool?’

The caf, she realised, was still hot, the cup almost burning her hands as she gripped it tighter. It was a useful sensation; something to focus on.

‘No tactics,’ she said. ‘I want to help you.’

Ben gripped the doorframe. ‘Snoke said it would be like this,’ he repeated. 

This was the man who had become Kylo Ren, she thought. Poisoned by Snoke’s lies. 

She focused on the heat of the caf, the steady churning of the ship’s engines, gathering what she could of the force. Maybe she couldn’t mind trick him like a stormtrooper, but she could put some weight in her words.

‘I’m going to help you.’ 

For a moment, she saw Ben as she knew him to be; the same terrified boy who’d been left at Luke’s temple all those years ago. But his fleeting expression of fear passed, and he stepped back, leaving the door open.

‘I have much to do,’ he said. 

He was several paces away before he turned.

‘I’ll leave the door unlocked,’ he said, almost as an afterthought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for all the kind reviews so far! <3


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